1. Field
The present disclosure relates to transmission of notifications, and more particularly, to methods and systems for distributing notifications in a notification system.
2. Background
Businesses and governmental entities, including federal and state officials, their agencies, municipalities and schools, are ever more reliant on communicating through the mass transmission of notifications to their staff, citizens and family members of students to keep these constituencies apprised of important events, and sometimes of emergencies. For example, a school principal might need to send a message to the parent of every child that the school will be closed the next day due to some unforeseen event such as flooding, fire, or freezing conditions. Notifications with such messages might be sent by telephones, facsimiles, pagers, electronic mail (email), and/or text messages. These notifications will typically vary in their degree of importance, in the number of recipients, or in the immediacy with which they must be sent.
However, there currently exists a growing problem as mass notification transmission systems become more prevalent. In particular, a group of notifications (e.g., notifications that are transmitted together from a mass notification provider 68) is provided to distributors without regard to the potential capacity of these distributors (e.g., telecommunication providers) responsible for delivering the notifications. Consequently, the notifications may be sent to a distributor with limited distribution capacity, potentially overloading the distribution network of the distributor, which may in turn result in a delay or failure in the delivery of the notifications, including for attempts by a distributor to re-deliver the notifications.
In such situations, because the distributor is incapable of handling delivery of the group of notifications, delivery of the notifications may be unsuccessful, especially when the distributor's network is experiencing a significant traffic burden. It would be desirable to distribute groups of notifications according to the anticipated available capacity of the distributors in order to avoid delays, failures, and attempted re-delivery of notifications.